


In Hindsight

by Dredfulhapiness



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Eileen reads the books, F/F, M/M, Men of Letters Bunker (Supernatural), Not Canon Compliant
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-20
Updated: 2021-02-20
Packaged: 2021-03-16 06:55:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,482
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29572086
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dredfulhapiness/pseuds/Dredfulhapiness
Summary: Eileen had googled the Winchesters the first time she met them. Despite scrolling through pages of murders, and robberies, and links to pay-per-view true crime specials about the murder spree they’d apparently gone on (and, damn if there wasn’t a lot) no books had come up.She’s even found true crime podcasts about their escapades, read transcript after transcript about the multiple times the Winchesters faked their deaths only to get caught committing another heinous crime seven states away. Hunting is rarely without its miscommunications, and that seems to be the basis of most of their run-ins with law enforcement and civilians.The books are a different beast entirely. Hushed confessions are far less intimate than reading their inner thoughts. She has the decency, at least, to skip over the sex scenes.Or, Eileen reads the books
Relationships: Castiel/Dean Winchester, Eileen Leahy/Sam Winchester
Comments: 60
Kudos: 502





	In Hindsight

If Eileen felt particularly compelled to impart blame, she’d say it was Becky’s fault.

“Are you sure you want to come?” Sam asks when they finish loading the car. “Becky is… A lot.”

Eileen raises an eyebrow, crosses her arms over her chest. “You don’t want me meeting your ex-wife?”

“Well it was… It was annulled, so she’s not technically my ex—“ He pulls his eyebrows together. “But honestly? No. She’s...” He looks Eileen over, raises his hand like he’s about to sign something, and then falters. Eileen tilts her head, then straightens with realization.

Her mouth widens in a smile and she scoffs. “You think we’re gonna fight over you!” She accuses and Sam grimaces.

He throws his hands up. “I didn’t say that. I’m just saying that she’s...”

“Crazy?” Eileen supplies, and his shoulders drop. He relaxes.

“Exactly.”

“I was always told not to date men with crazy ex girlfriends,” she tells him as he climbs into the driver’s seat.

She takes her own seat, waits until they’re moving, then says, “I wouldn’t fight over you anyway. She can have you.”

Sam rolls his eyes, but the corners of his lips twitch up in a smile.

—

Eileen is relieved to find that Becky has a husband and is at least semi-normal about seeing them when she opens the front door.

“Sam!” She exclaims immediately, then, unexpected, she meets Eileen’s gaze and, “You must be Eileen.”

Eileen shoots Sam a Look, and he shrugs back, shakes his head. He hadn’t, it seems, mentioned her.

“I saw Chuck’s notes,” Becky explains when they turn back to her. “He mentioned you a lot.” Her eyes flash to Sam when she says that, and Eileen feels him stiffen. When she glances up at him, his jaw is tight.

“What are you guys doing here? Is something wrong?”

Sam shakes his head. “We’re trying to make sure everyone got… put back. We don’t have your number, so we thought we’d just stop by.”

To Eileen’s surprise, Sam agrees to step inside.

She’s not sure what she’s expecting, but the mundanity of Becky’s house is what takes her by surprise. There’s a credenza with a bowl of keys perched underneath a “Live, Laugh, Love” sign. There’s a sheet of metal shaped like a bottle of wine with Facebook mom sayings written on it in various clashing typefaces. The shelf behind her couch is crowded with what looks like model cars and those hideous figurines they sell in nerd shops. Nightmarishly normal.

Even though they’re surrounded by pictures of Becky’s family Sam doesn’t accept a drink, so Eileen doesn’t either. Actually, he doesn’t even settle, stands in the entranceway to the kitchen with a guarded expression on his face. He’s doing that thing where he makes himself smaller, turns his shoulders inwards and stoops his head, so Eileen makes herself bigger. Becky makes eye contact, and she tilts her head up, unwavering.

“Becky,” Sam says as she pours herself a cup of tea. “What happened?”

Her shoulders deflate with her sigh. “I saw Chuck’s ending and it was awful.” She screws her face up. “I told him that, and I guess that isn’t what he wanted to hear, and then…” She waves her hand and takes a sip of her drink. “I was standing in my office like nothing had happened… Except it was five months later.”

Eileen looks between them. Sam’s frown is solemn, and Becky is still making eye contact with her tea. “The ending?”

Becky looks up. “Of Sam and Dean’s story. He showed me the last book.”

Neither of their expressions tells Eileen anything. “Biblical book?”

Sam winces. “No,” Is all he offers.

“The last _Supernatural_ book,” Becky clarifies.

And, oh. Okay. Why _wouldn’t_ that be the answer? Everything’s weird enough.

—

Eileen had googled the Winchesters the first time she met them. Despite scrolling through pages of murders, and robberies, and links to pay-per-view true crime specials about the murder spree they’d apparently gone on (and, damn if there wasn’t a lot) no books had come up.

So far, she’s pieced the Winchester’s lives together with snippets of conversation and news articles. A lot of it is said at night in empty rooms. She knows about Jess, but she doesn’t _know_ about Jess until Sam wakes up in the middle of the night trembling, switches on a light, and stares, dazed, at the cracking ceiling above their bed. He tells her, pained, that sometimes he wakes up and swears he smells smoke.

Dean’s the one who tells her about John, after he’s had too much to drink and is a little gushy. It starts as a story about staying with Bobby but somehow it turns into, “Sammy and Dad never got along, y’know. They were… Too much alike.” He looks regretful as soon as he says it, but he doesn’t backtrack. “It’s no wonder he tried to leave so often.” He brings the bottle up to the rim of his empty glass, then puts it down and flips his glass over. “He turned out better. That’s what matters.”

“When we were kids Dean used to make us Mac and cheese with a slice of velveeta and pre-cooked pasta.” Sam says one evening when they’re sitting in the bed of a borrowed truck spooning 7-11 ramen into their mouths. “Or he’d put hot dogs in those seventy-five cent packages of Top Ramen— or Spaghettios.” He stabs his spork into his noodles. “By the time I got to college I was an expert and making gas station food taste great.”

Cas is the one who brings up the demon blood. He tells the story over a late night cup of coffee, shoved into the corner booth of a 24 hour diner. His plate of pancakes is picked-over, and Eileen had stopped eating halfway through his story. “Maybe,” Cas laments when he’s finished, “we were too hard on him.” She doesn’t comment, just takes a sip of her orange juice and watches him slather his French fries with ketchup.

(There are the lighter revelations, too. Pointed Never Have I Ever questions. Some of them, admittedly, her own fault.

“Never have I ever been involved in robbing a bank,” She says on her turn, and revels in the states of bewilderment she’s met with. She doesn’t flinch when Sam and Dean meet her eye.

Sam’s mouth opens, then closes. He scrunches his nose, exchanges a look with Dean, and then they both take a hesitant sip of their drinks.

Cas stares at Dean’s profile. “You robbed a bank?”

Dean ignores him and leans forward in his seat. “How do you know about that?”

“I have Google alerts on for you two,” She says easily. “That was fifteen years ago today, by the way.”

“We didn’t actually rob a bank,” Sam is quick to defend. “There was a shapeshifter.”

“A shapeshifter framed you?”

Dean takes another sip of his beer and says, “Not that time.”

“Wait.” Sam points at Eileen. “You have Google alerts turned on for us?”

“Okay!” She says, clapping. “Cas’s turn.”)

She’s even found true crime podcasts about their escapades, read transcript after transcript about the multiple times the Winchesters faked their deaths only to get caught committing another heinous crime seven states away. Hunting is rarely without its miscommunications, and that seems to be the basis of most of their run-ins with law enforcement _and_ civilians.

The books are a different beast entirely. Hushed confessions are far less intimate than reading their inner thoughts. She has the decency, at least, to skip over the sex scenes.

They’re hard to read at times. She gets through _All Hell Breaks Loose_ with a growing tightness in her throat and then she wanders into the library just to give Sam a hug. It’s late, and he’s got a book and a half-downed cup of coffee in front of him when Eileen comes up behind him and wraps her arms around his shoulders. He presses a kiss to her bicep and leans back into her. She grounds herself in the moment and tries not to imagine him twenty-three and dying just inside the entrance of a ghost town.

She reads No Rest for the Wicked and slips her bacon on Dean’s plate the next morning.

(“What’s that for?” He signs, and all she can think to do is shrug. He slips a piece to Miracle and she thinks, gratefully, that some wounds have healed.)

She finds the next few books in a reddit thread, all of it linking back to BeckyWinchester and it’s too damning to be a coincidence, so she reads those too. She knows they’re legit, anyway, because she recognizes some of the stories. She’d heard abridged versions of their experiences time traveling.

Plus, if one of Dean’s first impressions of Cas is that he’s “surprisingly attractive”, well, that’s just one more passage to highlight.

—

“Sam?” She asks when enters the room after a shower. “If a girl dumps her underwear in front of you, what do you think that means?”

He pauses, turns to look at her over his shoulder. She’s tucked in under the covers, her computer open on her lap.

“What?” He asks as he pulls a pair of sweatpants on.

She clears her throat dramatically and reads off of her laptop, “Just as Sam thinks he’s out of the clear, she’s standing over him and dumping an entire laundry basket worth of panties onto the table in front of him. She picks up a light blue pair of lace underwear and starts folding them. ‘You know what?’ Sam asks, and regrets looking up at Madison when he makes direct eye contact with her. ‘I think I _will_ go sit on the couch.’”

Eileen looks up at Sam and finds his eyebrows knit together and eyes bugging out of his head.

“That’s an excerpt from _Heart,_ by the way.”

Sam bites back a groan, but his expression is pained. “You’re reading the books?”

Eileen hums and his face falls.

“I didn’t want to assume anything.” He pulls a t-shirt over his head.

“What a gentleman.” Eileen rolls her eyes. “It’s cute how clueless you are.”

“I’m not clueless,” Sam defends. “If I dumped my underwear out in front of you, would you think I was flirting?”

“Your underwear isn’t blue and lacy,” Eileen says. “I’d think you were gross.”

She catches the wet towel he tosses at her just before it can hit her and starts laughing.

—

Eileen waits until just before they start the movie and her feet are balanced on Sam’s lap, to casually ask, “So is it true Sam got beat up by clowns?”

Everyone turns to her at the same time. Sam’s hand tightens around her ankle. Dean’s face lights up.

“Hell yeah it is. He looked like— how do you sign ‘strip club’?”

Eileen demonstrates, doesn’t bother mentioning that it’s specifically the sign for a male strip club, watches him repeat the motion a couple of times before continuing,

“He looked like he’d rolled around on the floor of a strip club.”

“Strip club?” Jack asks, and Cas just shakes his head at him.

“There were three of them,” Sam defends, “and they were unkillable.”

“I’m the one who killed Pennywise,” Dean clarifies, and Sam shoots a withering glare in his direction.

“You didn’t even go near them,” Sam argues.

“I was too busy fighting an actual person.” Sam sighs and rolls his eyes. Eileen leans further into the pillow she’s propped up against and offers him a sympathetic frown.

She nods, pretends to think. “But Sam’s the one who killed Paris Hilton?” She clarifies, and puts a hand on Sam’s shoulder when he laughs. “Who I’m pretty sure you got your ass kicked by?”

“Only after Sam got his shit rocked by Ghandi.”

Cas looks between them, then squints at Sam. “You got beat up by Ghandi?”

“It wasn’t the _actual_ Ghandi. It was a—“ He rubs a hand over his eyes and says, “She’s reading the books.”

Dean’s face falls.

“They’re very insightful,” Eileen says.

“I bet. You know, we didn’t even get any profit from those?”

“You live in a mansion,” Eileen deadpans. He turns his back on her and goes back to picking out a movie.

Sam takes Eileen’s hand and locks their fingers together.

—

“Okay,” Eileen says from the passenger seat of the car. Dean glances over at her. There’s some dried blood just below her ear from the vamp nest they’ve just cleared. She’s got the bag full of dinner tucked between her feet, and she steals a fry from the paper bag before continuing, “Why Bert and Ernie?”

He blinks and risks another glance over at her. “What are you talking about?”

“You told Cas, quote, ‘There are two things I know for certain. One, Bert and Ernie are gay. Two, you’re not gonna die a virgin.’”

His knuckles go white around the wheel.

“I was just wondering why those two specific facts.”

Dean purses his lips together and doesn’t answer, so Eileen shrugs.

“And in the same chapter you compared the two of you to Thelma and Louise?”

A muscle in his cheek twitches.

“Dean?”

He can feel her staring him down. She’s got, like, laser eyes, and he can see her just in the corner of his periphery biting her lip to hold back a smirk. And, dear god, he loves her, he does, but sometimes she can be more of a pain in the ass than Sam can be. She’s too smart, too funny, too witty, yada yada yada.

She is also, as it turns out, too stubborn.

“I’m not having this conversation.” He goes to reach for the volume knob on the radio, then pulls back when the realization hits him that it isn’t the dramatic conversation ender with Eileen that it would be with Sam.

“It took twelve years for you two to get together,” Eileen says. “After Bert and Ernie?”

Dean eyes the line of trees just off the road and tries to calculate if Baby could take the hit. Maybe oncoming traffic? Eileen’s gaze is still hot on his cheek. Fuck, maybe off a cliff would be the best course of action and, no, he didn’t get that idea just because Eileen mentioned _Thelma and Louise._

“We’ve been busy,” He says gruffly. “You know, saving the world.”

“For twelve years?”

“For twelve years.”

“Then what’s with the more profound bond?”

When he turns the radio up, it’s just so he doesn’t have to hear her anymore. She spends the rest of the ride home regarding him with a smug stare and he spends the rest of the ride wishing the Impala seat would swallow him whole.

That night, after dinner, Eileen innocently suggest they watch _Thelma and Louise_ and Dean isn’t sure if he wants to die or if he wants to kill her.

**Author's Note:**

> I plan on updating this when I think of more scenes! If you liked this, kudos and comments are welcome, and you can feel free to find me on Tumblr @queenofmoons !


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